Sites of Gender Women, Men and Modernity in Southern Dunedin, 1890-1939

In 1893 the women of southern Dunedin supported the campaign for female suffrage far more vigorously than women in any other city in the country. Change was in the air. In southern Dunedin as in most of the Western world, transformations in femininity and masculinity both shaped and were shaped by the era of modernity. This book, the product of five years' work by an interdisciplinary group of scholars, examines gender in a particular 'place': the suburbs of southern Dunedin, which were in many respects typical of Western societies, but also relatively predisposed towards gender change. The authors address gender through a series of 'sites': work, education, consumption, leisure, poverty, mobility and transport, health, and religion. Through this decisive fifty-year period, as young women increasingly worked for pay before marriage and went on to have fewer babies than their mothers, and as many men began turning their backs on the pub to spend more time with their families, such apparently unobtrusive changes in gender relations reshaped the experience of urban life and played a major part in making it modern. This book demonstrates how 'setting gender deep' in the context of a particular place - in this case New Zealand's earliest industrial suburbs - can illuminate the complex character of a key issue in debates about culture and society.